Residencies Programme
Supporting artists is at the core of what we do. Rua Red is a thriving creative community that is a nurturing environment to support artistic development and production. Rua Red provides a variety of residency opportunities for artists across artforms, creating space and resources for artists to research and develop their work and build relationships with the many artists and organisations based here.
This year's resident artists include Array Collective, Orla Barry, Junk Ensemble, Colm Keegan, and a series of Traveller-led residencies.
SUPPORT—INGARTISTS
STUDIO
ARTISTS
Cecilia Bullo
Pauline Cummins
Monika Crowley
Joan Somers Donnelly
Michael Dignam
Rua Red offers 9 low-cost working spaces for visual artists: 2 studios for emerging artists in the early stage of their career; 5 studios for mid-career and established artists; 1 project based studio for artists commissioned to make new work for the gallery; and 1 facilitated studio for artists with disabilities led by Tallaght Community Arts (DoubleTake Studio).
Studios are allocated by open call and panel selection. The studio programme enhances the artistic programme at Rua Red supports its remit to build and develop the arts infrastructure in South Dublin County.
Cecilia Bullo is an Irish/Italian visual artist who makes sculptures and multimedia installations. Her work is research-based and informed by historical, mythological, psychoanalytic and ecofeminist theories, with particular focus on rituals of healing, transformation connected to cultural traditions. Trained classically and primarily sculpture based, her approach is visceral, restless and driven by curiosity, continually seeking other means for expression through new mediums, processes and collaborations.
She holds a Bachelor of Fine Art in sculpture from the Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT), Dublin, Ireland; a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Brera Fine Art Academy, Milan, Italy; and a Master’s in Fine Art from the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), Dublin, Ireland.
Cecilia is currently a studio member at RUA RED contemporary art space, and is a recipient of numerous awards including Fire Station Artists’ Studios 2020–2023, the Arts Council, Dublin City Council, Art & Disability Ireland, Culture Ireland, Creative Ireland, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council and a forthcoming Artist Residency Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, FR (2025).
Recent solo shows include: Being Haunted by the Breezes, Now How Will You Exist?, RHA, IE (2023), LEIGHEAS–LIMINALIS: antidotes for melancholic gestures, The Dock, IE (2023), Bleach Those Tongues, Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin IE (2021).
Selected recent group exhibitions and performances include: In Dreams, Esker Arts, Tullamore, IE, (2024); Endlessnessnessness, The LAB Gallery, Dublin, IE (2024); Vox Magicae – an invocatory evening of voice, language, sound, improvisation, rhythm and beyond, Kirkos Ensemble, Dublin, IE (2023); Periodical Review 12 – Practical Magic, Pallas Projects/Studios, Dublin, IE (2022/23); I know why the caged bird sings, WARP, Sint-Niklaas, BE (2022); Material Stories, Galerie Michaela Stock, Vienna, AU, (2022); Biomedia: Illness, Art and Medicine, Museum of Contemporary Art, Querétaro, MX (2020); and Transgender, Gender and Psychoanalysis, Freud Museum/Draper Hall, London, UK (2017).
Monika's work embraces the absurdity of life while searching for meaning in the everyday. Reconsidering everyday acts as sacred, defiant rituals performed in the face of entropy, acts of resistance against the idea that we exist in a purposeless, chaotic universe. Through graphite, oil paint, chalk, and layered materials, her practice explores the tension between permanence and impermanence. A visual language where the mundane becomes ritual, and the everyday becomes, if not eternal, then at least worth pausing for.
Monika is a member of Graphic Studio Dublin. Her work is widely exhibited and held in national collections. She has received Arts Council Agility Awards and research funding from the Paul Mellon Foundation and the Thomas Dammann Trust, and recently completed an MA in Fine Art at NCAD. Monika's MFA graduate installation in Rua Red June 2025, was long-listed for the RDS Visual Art Award and shortlisted for the Global Creative Graduate Showcase 2025, in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture and Monaco Foundry. She received an Incubation Space Award from The LAB & Dublin City Arts office for 3 months in 2026 and was also awarded an Emerging Artists Studio at Rua Red.
As Visual Arts Director at Ranelagh Arts, Monika has expanded the artist network and curated a dynamic programme spanning visual art and public engagement. She collaborates with Dublin City Council Community Officers to engage cohorts from sheltered communities, and with the Occupational Therapy Unit at the Royal Hospital Donnybrook.
Monika's current project Doubt is Beautiful, unfolds through her practice alongside a participatory approach with a community five years post-cancer treatment. It stems from an ongoing exploration of time, impermanence, and the quiet rituals that shape a life.
Pauline Cummins’ performance and video work examines the human condition from a feminist perspective. Research driven themes of the political body, activism, human rights and gender are often explored in the artist’s practice. Cummins likes to collaborate with artists and communities in public sites and situations; including within prisons as a visiting artist and was the founding chairperson of the Women Artists Action Group, (WAAG). Cummins lectured at the National College of Art and Design from 1994 – 2014. Her work is in both national and international collections including The Irish Museum of Modern Art and the National Maternity Hospital. Commissions include the Newgrange Interpretive Centre, New St. Park (Dublin) and the National Maternity Hospital.
A new retrospective book of Walking in the Way: Performing Masculinity, Pauline Cummins and Frances Mezzetti, published by WAAG is now available from IMMA Bookshop and The Library Project, Dublin.
Cummins was recently an Artist in Residence at The Irish Museum of Modern Art from 2021 – 2022 and is currently based in Rua Red artists studios.
Michael Dignam is a visual artist and filmmaker. His practice explores shifting ideas of class, labour, and belonging, often responding to fractured histories and speculative futures. Through layered, research-led projects, he examines how identities are shaped by changing dynamics of space, power, and collective memory. Working across film, installation, performance, and archival reconstruction, he uses layering, material experimentation, and collaboration to explore the slippages between memory, politics, and place. His work is grounded in lived experience and place-based research, often beginning from personal or local histories and expanding outward to engage with broader social, political, and economic structures.
He holds a Bachelor of Fine Art in Sculpture from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, where he received the NCAD Student of the Year Award (2013), and a Master’s in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London, where he was awarded a Junior Fellowship (2016).
Michael is a current studio artist at Rua Red. Recent exhibitions include ISLANDS, Zyrland Zoiropa Gallery, Berlin (2026); A Phenomenon Only Slightly Strange (screening), Thkio Ppalies, Nicosia (2026); ANTHROPOZÄNTA, T. Cook Building, Hof, Bavaria (2023); and Uprooting Tallaght, Rua Red, Dublin (2023).
Joan Somers Donnelly is an artist from Dublin with a collaborative performance practice. They are primarily concerned with examining existing social structures and creating not-yet-existing ones, using live situations as testing grounds for experiments in different ways of relating.
Joan's previous work includes a human choir that performed for cows, an interactive fantasy about the politics of housing in Dublin, a video essay about social spaces of gig economy workers, and performances and other interventions for lamp posts, zoom calls, metro stations and apartments. In recent years their work has focused on the creation of frameworks for exchange and co-creation, such as the group improvisation practice messing, the platform for collaboration You and Me, an Anger Club, and a practice-sharing space for women and genderqueer artists called In practice(s). Their current focus is on building a community of improvisation practice that supports a diverse range of movers and makers to explore their own idio-aesthetics, develop their performance practices and contribute to co-creative projects. Joan is also an ensemble member of the experimental music and performance group Kirkos and has been involved in a range of other collective projects in Ireland and Belgium including the Truck Stop Cultural Center, the para-institute for art and precarity, One Field Fallow, Post/Pandemics by radical_hope, and with Outlandish Theatre Platform.
Joan holds a BA in Drama and Theatre Studies from Trinity College and an MFA in Autonomous Design from KASK School of Arts Ghent. Their work has been supported by Lasso Brussels, radical_house, Common Ground Dublin, Kirkos, Dublin Fringe Festival, and the Arts Council of Ireland.
Raw Portraits—Ailish Claffey
TRAVELLER
ARTIST IN
RESIDENCE
With the assistance of Mount Street Club Trust, Rua Red supports an in-house Traveller led arts initiative guided by a steering group made up of creative individuals from the Travelling community who support the participants with their expertise and skills. The initiative aims to be a go-to resource, a residency space where Traveller artists, activists, musicians, creatives and content makers are supported to make work in various formats such as digital, broadcast, video, photography, moving image and audio storytelling. Each residency is tailored to suit each individual’s needs.
The steering group are: Chair: Oein DeBhairduin - poet, writer, and educator; Rosaleen McDonagh - playwright, and author; Trish Reilly - singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist; Maggie McDonagh - National Traveller Mental Health Network; Sharyn Ward - singer and performer; Mary McDonagh - community development and advocate for Travellers working within the arts.
Sarah McDonagh comes from both the Traveller and settled communities and is deeply passionate about writing, particularly poetry. She loves performing and acting whenever the opportunity arises and has recently begun rehearsals for a new show this year. With nearly 18 years of experience working part-time in healthcare, Sarah brings dedication and care to every aspect of her life.
She is also a proud single parent to an inspiring young man currently studying in college. Grateful for the achievements and opportunities she’s experienced so far, Sarah continues to find joy in spending time with family, meeting new people, and growing through her creative passions in poetry, writing, acting, and performance.
DANCERS IN
RESIDENCE
Matt Szczerek
Junk Ensemble
Karen Aguiar
Cathy Coughlan
Ailish Claffey
Dance Artist in Residence
Junk Ensemble is a multi-award winning Dublin-based dance theatre company founded by twin sisters Megan Kennedy and Jessica Kennedy. The company is committed to engaging diverse audiences through the creation and presentation of brave, imaginative and accessible work that sheds light on important human issues relevant to society today. Current Associate Artists at Project Arts Centre and previous Artists-in-Residence at The Tate, Junk Ensemble has built a reputation as one of Ireland’s leading voices in dance. Junk Ensemble frequently collaborates with artists from other disciplines to produce a rich mix of visual and performance styles that challenge the traditional audience/performer relationship. This approach has led to productions being created in non-traditional or found spaces as well as more conventional theatre spaces. The company often work directly with communities in the creation and performance of their work. Their work has toured to New York, Europe, UK & Ireland.
Junk Ensemble recent productions include Powerful Trouble (Dublin Theatre Festival 2023), Ritual (Cork Midsummer Festival 2023), Dances Like a Bomb (Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2023/Dublin Dance Festival 2022), The Cold Sings (Dublin Theatre Festival 2022), Crossing Skin (Cairde Sligo Arts Festival 2022), The Misunderstanding of Myrrha (Dublin Dance Festival 2021/Mermaid Arts Centre 2020), The Veiled Ones (Baboró International Arts Festival for Children 2021/Dublin Fringe Festival 2021), A Different Wolf (Cork Opera House/Cork Midsummer Festival 2019), The Bystander (Dublin Theatre Festival 2018), Dolores (Dublin Dance Festival 2018), Man at the Door/Cork Midsummer Festival 2018), Soldier Still (Irish Tour 2018/Belfast Festival/Dublin Fringe 2017).
Choreography for film includes It Is In Us All (dir. Antonia Campbell Hughes), The Tower (dir. Jesse Jones), Wildfire (dir. Cathy Brady), In Velvet (Junk Ensemble), Five Letters to the Stranger Who Will Dissect My Brain (dir. Oonagh Kearney), Fallow Table (Junk Ensemble). Choreography for theatre includes The Last Return (Druid Theatre), What Did I Miss (The Ark).
2022—2023
Karen Aguiar is a migrant woman, journalist & socially engaged artist believing in the transformative power of dance to unite people and nurture a collective space to build power from and of the people. Karen is the Creative Director of Go Dance For Change and envisions it as a space for meaningful integration and collective action. Starting in 2018, Go Dance For Change is a cross-cultural collaborative platform that produces social spaces using dance as their primary tool to connect people through a variety of immersive and engaging dance-related activities such as programmes, workshops, parades, performances and events sharing culture, promoting health and integration through dance. Go Dance For Change places a strong emphasis on well-being, community building and female empowerment with the aim to highlight diverse cultures and their people in the hopes of decolonising the narratives within the dance scene in Ireland.
2019—2020
Matt Dance Artist in Residence 2019 - 2020. Matt Szczerek is a Dublin based (contemporary-urban) dance artist and a professional member of Dance Ireland. Over the last 3 years he has danced regularly with CoisCeim Dance Theatre, performing as a principal dancer in the "Wolf and Peter" (2017 Sydney Opera House), and in RTE’s 1916 Centenary performance at Bord Gais Energy Theatre, choreographed by David Bolger. Matt just finished a National tour with Monica Martin Munoz's work “Princesses can be Pirates” (2018-2019) funded by the Arts Council and concluding with a performance at Dublin Dance Festival.
In January 2019 Matt was selected as a one of 3 choreographers to present his work as a part of Lighting Design for Dance project mentored by Liz Roche in partnership with the Lír academy and Dance Ireland. In 2018 he presented “Fable” for Dublin Fringe Festival at Project Art Centre. The work was nominated for a best ensemble award. In 2017 Matt was selected by Far from the norm Dance Company led by Botis Seva to be part of an international cast for production of "Union Black" funded by Creative Europe, which toured to the UK, France, Sweden and Ireland.
Matt is the Director/Curator of Dance2Connect, a 3 day urban dance festival at the Civic Theatre, South Dublin. Funded and supported by Dance Ireland, Tallaght Community Arts, Civic Theatre and The Arts Council. Most recently Matt received an Arts Council Bursary Award and co-production support from Crying Out Loud Dance Company (UK) for his new choreographic work “Blame Game”. He completed a weeks residency in Red Bridge Drama Centre in London with workshops for street circus collective, followed by 10 days residency in Breda (Netherlands). “Blame Game” work in progress was performed as a part of Loud to develop full length piece.
- Residencies for blame game consist of:
PPCM (Paris) august 2019
Subtopia (Sweden) September 2019
Red Bridge Drama Centre ( London) November 2019
2018—2019
Dance Artist in Residence 2018 - 2019. Cathy Coughlan is a multidisciplinary artist based in Dublin. Supported by The Arts Council Cathy trained as a professional dancer in the UK (1994-97) and continued her arts training with The National College of Art and Design, gaining a B.A. in fine art (2005), where her practice, deeply rooted in dance, primarily developed through video installation and performance. In September 2018 Cathy will commence a residency at Rua Red , funded by The Arts Council with support from South Dublin County Council. It is her second residency at Rua Red and her third Arts Council supported residency.
In 2016 Cathy was awarded Create’s – Artist in the Community - Bursary Award. Cathy’s research in association with Create focused on new modes of collaborative practice through screen based technology. This work culminated in the co-founding of HAVOC Dance Company - a remote company centred around the expanding definitions of dance and performance. Oil & Water was presented in 2016 in Rua Red Gallery 1 & 2, as a series of ‘digital duets’ with Magda Hylak, Jessie Keenan, Ailish Claffey and Matt Szczerek. In 2017 Cathy presented Remotely Human, an installation featuring dance artists Laura Murphy and Ailish Claffey, at Ireland’s leading Digital Art Festival - Glitch 2017. In September 2018 she will present dance-theater production "Fable" as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, at The Project Arts Centre, produced in collaboration with Dance Ireland.
Cathy’s work has been presented at LightMoves Festival of Screen Dance (Out Side In 2016), InContext 4 Festival (Trans-Border 2016), Rewind Film Festival (Shift 2016), Bealtainne Festival (Multiple) and Dublin Fringe Festival (Source 2014 - received two award nominations). Her work is supported by Dublin City Council (Bursary/Project Award), Laois County Council/Laois Partnership (Residency support funding), The Dunamaise Arts Centre (2010-2012 DAR Residency-Youth Ensemble Scheme Award), Dance Ireland (2013/2014 Residency) and Shawbrook Dance Centre (2015 Residency).
As an artist working in a collaboration with communities she has delivered projects and performances in association with RADE, Common Ground, Create, Focus Ireland, the Fatima Regeneration Project, Dunamaise Arts Centre, Dublin City Council and Dance Ireland. Between 2008-2015 Cathy has worked closely with Philippa Donnellan (CoisCeim Broadreach) in association with Bealtainne Festival and Dublin City Council – presenting work at IMMA, Hugh Lane Gallery, Aviva stadium, Axis Theatre and The IFI.
Dance Artist in Residence 2017 - 2018
Ailish Claffey is a freelance collaborative dance artist concerned with dance, health and well-being. Ailish Claffey is a dance artist and movement practitioner with an interest in health, well-being and older people. Specialising in choreological studies, Ailish works in a collaborative capacity exploring and creating work that examines the complexity of human relationships.
The Dance Back Home is a new film documentary exploring the role of dance within a healthcare setting. This was a collaboration between Ailish Claffey (dancer in residence) and Deirdre Glenfield (visual artist in residence), at Tallaght Hospital. Commissioned by South Dublin County Council and screened at Rua Red as part of Sensing Movement.
Ailish recently collaborated with The National Centre for Arts and Health curating and producing Sensing Movement, a dance, health and wellbeing symposium held at Rua Red, July 28th. This was kindly funded by South Dublin County Council, The Arts Council, Ireland with support from The Meath Foundation and Rua Red South Dublin Arts Centre.
BETWEEN SPIRIT AND SKIN Ailish’s most recent solo, created in response to experience working as dancer in residence at Tallaght Hospital, was presented at Rua Red Gallery as part of Oil & Water June 2016.
As a founding member of HAVOC Dance and Curator of 2016 Kildare Dance and Movement Summer School / Dance and Health Seminar in collaboration with Kildare Arts Specialist, Carolann Courtney, Ailish continues her work within Kildare as dancer in residence at McAuley Place, Naas. Ailish leads weekly dance classes for those with Parkinsons Disease at DanceHouse, kindly supported by Dance Ireland. 2017 will see Ailish entering her third and most extensive residency yet for The National Centre for Arts and Health, Tallaght Hospital with thanks to funding from South Dublin County Council and The Arts Council, Ireland.
THE
PROCESS
SPACE
Rua Red’s Process Space is a dedicated area for collaboration with artists, groups, and various initiatives. The Process Space provides a supportive environment for visiting artists and organisations to research and develop work, fostering innovation and creativity.
Address
Rua Red, South Dublin Arts Centre
Plás Parthalán
Tallaght, D24 KV8N
Gallery Opening Hours
Monday to Saturday: 10am—6pm
Building Opening Hours
Monday to Friday:
9.30am—9.30pm
Saturday: 10am—6pm
Café Opening Hours
Monday to Friday:
9.30am—4pm
Saturday: 10am—3pm
Information Desk
Rua Red's Reception is located straight on from the main entrance. Staff are happy to help with any questions you have.
Admission to the gallery is free. Rua Red is proud to be supported by the Arts Council, South Dublin County Council, Creative Ireland, and the Government of Ireland; Project Ireland 2040.
Registered Charity No. CHY 18403
© Rua Red 2026
